The importance of checking

When I was at school, my teachers had a way of cutting down their workload – we would swap with the boy at the next desk and score each other’s test papers. I am thinking about the importance of checking in our everyday life. We check our clothes as we go out, and perhaps a friendly hand adjusts our collar for us. I remember a concept, the double-boundary of the self, I don’t know if this s a commonplace of psychological theory, but it is a simple idea: an inner boundary of the self as determined by what we understand of ourselves; an outer boundary is set by how others think of us. This is a negotiating model of the self, leading to a kind of border control, which may be more or less friendly or hostile in our relations with others. If there is too much of a discrepancy between the inner and the outer boundary, a disputed territory, we are said to be mad, bad, dangerous to know. I have returned to this image of negotiation over disputed territory in thinking about the difficulties of dialogue in a polarised society. It is a common observation at this time to think of our society in the UK and that of the US as particularly polarised. This may be true, or – in line with all such observations – was it not always so? The difference now may be experienced in part, because of a growing underlying assumption that we should not be so polarised: a desire to explore, challenge, understand and ultimately overcome the difference represented by race, class, gender and other markers of an identity which may be fixed or fluid in our own perceptions. We may seek a different passport to get away from a too constricting national identity. We are invited to score ourselves in tickboxes: white British, or several other categories, or Other if we think none apply? The list is extended, while well-meaning attempts to cluster difference (BAME?) are challenged. The GBTQIA community is also increasingly diverse. There is a hot debate whether we can assign ourselves to the gender of our choice. It can look like a free-for-all but there are countervailing forces: the accusation of cultural appropriation, no platforming and a cancel culture. As a student I blagged my way into Ronnie Scotts to hear Lenny Bruce. The comedians – for a liberal the licenced fools of our society, like Shakespeare’s Fool - are increasingly on the defensive about their freedom to offend. Remember ‘Je suis Charlie.’ In my work we think of the licensed stupidity of the Tavistock consultant, using our ignorance to ask questions that it is assumed have already been answered. I am not always calm and wise. This may be a disappointment to myself and others. But it is an aspect of group psychology that we know about, that at any given moment individuals in the group may be mobilised according to their valency for positions that have a temporary attraction to them. We react, needing to express that part of ourselves that is not being represented in the dominant affect in the group at that time. This is not a question of right and wrong- but the working out of an unconscious balance. You may see it in a case discussion – the need to challenge the emerging consensus that may determine the outcome for a vulnerable child, and the reason why courts rather than child protection workers make the final decision. I suggest that this unconscious balance helps to explain why in a large societal context we see that democratic elections are so often won and lost by small margins. In seeking to represent what we think is missing in the other, we contribute to an almost universal feeling of being misunderstood and marginal. The marginality of both the left and the right in conventional politics but also the marginality (and the covert extremism) of the so-called centre. White privilege feels marginalised by the assertiveness of Black Lives Matter. Male heterosexuality is challenged by the new orthodoxy of Gay Pride. We adopt the syntax of difference. I am liberal. You are mistaken. He she or it is a bigot. (Correction: they are a bigot. It is becoming unacceptable to assign an identity to the other without their agreement, but we still want to give them a kicking.] The reality of significant differences is obscured by the narcissism of small difference, identified by Freud, from an anthropological observation of 'the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other'. This brings me back to the image of the double boundary and the negotiations that take place over disputed borders. In a process of desocialisation, as I have described it, we stay behind our bunkers. The danger in negotiations is that we then risk too much – or too little when we come out into the open.